Yale Struggles With Its Future Course

Yale Struggling To Plot Its Way Through The '90s

April 15, 1992|By MATTHEW KAUFFMAN; Courant Staff Writer

NEW HAVEN — "This university has a long tradition of strong opinions, strongly expressed. It does not run in a bland, smooth, unruffled fashion. It is feisty and sparks fly and there is drama," - Yale University spokeswoman Martha Matzke.

Chalk it up to those strong opinions, strongly expressed.

Yale University has spent the past year in a wrenching quest for its future, feeling its way through the difficult, and sometimes noisy, process of trying to trim costs without trashing one of the nation's premier universities.

Along the way, there have been casualties and celebrities. Monday night, Yale College Dean Donald Kagan became both, chastising his fellow faculty members during a speech, then capping the fiery address with the surprise announcement that he was quitting as one of Yale's highest-ranking officials.

Kagan's resignation came three weeks after Provost Frank Turner announced he would step down as Yale's second-in-command. And it follows a year that has seen walkouts by Yale's teaching assistants and a brief job action by unionized workers.

Kagan -- one of Yale's leading purveyors of the strong opinion, strongly expressed -- said he chose the Monday night speech to announce his resignation because he wanted a dramatic forum to protest faculty resistance to restructuring the school.

"I concluded that I had to make a statement about what I perceived as a threat to the quality of our undergraduate education here," Kagan said Tuesday.

And thus was born another story about turmoil at Yale. But for all the saber-rattling and placard-waving, some at Yale see this year's upheaval as the healthy effect of robust debate.

Yale, they assure, will endure.

"I don't think anybody here sees this as more than a rocky blip on the trajectory of Yale," said Thomas Carew, a psychology professor.

At the heart of Yale's institutional angst is the widely held belief that the university will have to cut costs if it hopes to maintain a balanced budget over the next decade. That belief

manifested itself in what is known around campus as the "white paper," a report that recommended Yale reduce the size of the undergraduate faculty by more than 10 percent over the next decade.

The report was received by the affected departments with all the collegiality of politicians whose careers are wiped out by redistricting.

The battle began, and for some, the rhetoric was fortified by the sense that the administration didn't much care for what the faculty had to say. The Yale administration is often portrayed by critics as a paternalistic shove-it-down-your-throat oligarchy. Many assumed the restructuring report, which had been commissioned by Yale President Benno C. Schmidt, would be accepted with few alterations.

But Schmidt put off the approval of the report and assembled a group of faculty members to consider alternatives. That committee, headed by Carew, the psychologist, recommended cutting only half the number of teaching positions the original report suggested. To make up the difference, the report recommended a building-maintenance program less ambitious than Schmidt's $1 billion proposal and changes in how the school restricts the use of its money.

Most of the faculty loved the report. Kagan hated it. He said the new report missed the severity of Yale's budget troubles and ignored the horrible condition of many buildings.

During Monday night's speech, he said faculty members were in "frenzied denial" over the extent of Yale's troubles and were single-mindedly interested in preserving the size of the faculty.

"The focus, the framework, is wrong. It's too narrow. It's too focused on the faculty," Kagan said Tuesday. "That's only one of many things of importance to undergraduates, and it totally ignores everything else."

Stephanie Plasse, editor of the Yale Daily News, said the school's long-term financial troubles have been difficult for the community to digest because Yale seems so wealthy. The school's $2.6 billion endowment is one of the largest in the world. And with an annual operating budget of nearly $800 million, savings from cutting faculty -- about $5 million a year -- seem trivial, she said.

Were the university still living the carefree days when money flowed more freely into, and less rapidly out of, the campus, there would be no hard choices to make